Steve Vinoski has been an Erlang user for over five years and has been a committer on the Yaws project for about four years. He wrote the Yaws sendfile driver, which eventually led to the file:sendfile functionality in Erlang R15B, as well as the enhanced streaming capabilities Yaws provides. Together with Yaws creator Claes "Klacke" Wikström and fellow committer Christopher Faulet, he helps provide support for general Yaws fixes and enhancements.

He's also contributed a number of patches to Erlang/OTP, including a revival of the format_status callback for gen_server and other standard behaviors. Steve also writes "The Functional Web" column for IEEE Internet Computing magazine, where he explores the application of functional programming languages, including Erlang, to web development.

Steve is an architect at Basho Technologies, Cambridge, MA, USA, the makers of the popular Riak NoSQL database, which is mostly implemented in Erlang. Prior to joining Basho he worked at Verivue, a content delivery provider located in Westford, MA, USA, where he introduced Erlang in 2007 and then helped a half dozen developers learn it well enough to use it in production for several parts of Verivue's content delivery solutions.

Ever since Mnesia entered the scene in 1995, Erlang has been a language for the most discriminating database hackers. With CouchDB, Scalaris and Riak, Erlang is now on the forefront of the NoSQL wave - the biggest revolution in the database world since E.F. Codd invented the Relational Model. Alongside massive non-relational storage mediums, Erlang’s ability to distribute load across massive clusters has resulted in a wide range of frameworks, applications and uses around big data. This tracks investigates them all.